So, here’s the thing. I have a new iPhone and an old Mac. iOS 11 (still in beta as of today) and El Capitan (no more updates for this Mac). I use iCloud photo library in both devices. When I take a photo in the new format with my iPhone 7, is there any way to use it right away in my mac, without having to convert it in my iPhone first? I mean, can I get those photos synced through iCloud and converted locally on my Mac?

I have tried to find a third party software that could do that kind of conversion, but was not able to find any that would work on El Capitan. Any idea?

You should be able to convert HEIF photos on export. Have you tried that?
– AllanSep 1 '17 at 17:27

I am still trying to understand the mechanics of it. I have set it to Automatic in the iPhone. But I got a couple heic files in Photos app through iCloud Photo Library sync and also when downloading from iCloud website. I guess the website shout allow us to export a JPEG. And it would be nice to have the same in Photos app, in El Capitan.
– Victor DomingosSep 1 '17 at 17:31

I would like to start using the new format in order to save space, but still have some way to access my photos from my current Mac.
– Victor DomingosSep 1 '17 at 17:32

Well... Now I was able to download a JPG version of a HEIC photo from iCloud website. Not sure if I changed something in my settings since the last time I tried. But Photos app still reports the synced file (not the one I downloaded) as a .HEIC. And if I try to export it, it does not work. Only JPGs get exported. Which is weird, because the photo gets displayed normally in the photos app.
– Victor DomingosSep 1 '17 at 18:11

1

@Mark yeah, that was one of my first thoughts, but it seems that their HEIC conversion is a feature that only works in a more recent OS.
– Victor DomingosSep 1 '17 at 18:16

What does "convert: no decode delegate for this image format `HEIC" mean?
– gapMar 9 at 22:16

1

@gap, you error message means you don't have the right stuff installed to deal with the HEIC format. brew upgrade imagemagick solved this problem for me.
– kuzzoorooApr 19 at 19:11

@gap Not sure. My original install command had an extra option: brew install imagemagick --with-libheif, but others said it wasn't needed anymore. You could give that a try. Maybe it makes a difference depending on your OSX version.
– wisbuckyApr 24 at 18:04

@wisbucky, regarding my non-deleted answer: you were right. not sure what was going on before. Thanks for the feedback. 👍
– KirbyMay 13 at 23:05

I found Dropbox to be a good conversion tool, as it does it transparently for the usage on any operating system and platform.

When you do the shot from iPhone, Dropbox automatically converts .heic image to .jpg when uploading it to computer (controlled by the settings). Since I'm using both Windows OS and MacOS, there's no need to install separate additional applications.

An excellent command line tool that works very well is tifig. It can be easily compiled on multiple platforms. It should compile on any platform with a relatively modern development toolchain, that should include El Capitan!

I followed the instructions in the repo to install tifig using brew install cmake vips ffmpeg (from the repo) but it doesn't seem to work (tifig command not found).
– Amelio Vazquez-ReinaOct 8 '18 at 21:28

I don't know if you did or not, but you have to follow the build instructions as well. To execute inside build folder after build, just run ./tifig -v -p file.heic file.jpg
– kentrhDec 13 '18 at 17:41

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